Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday May 22, 2010 @07:33PM
from the just-had-to-be-first-didn't-you dept.

gjt writes "I awoke this morning to see TechCrunch's MG Siegler post what appeared to be the first news of Froyo's availability. I frantically went to my phone's settings and tried to check for an update -oe but no luck. Then I went to xda-developers.com and sure enough there was a very long thread (now over 132 pages) of fellow eager beavers waiting for release (and trying to figure out how to get it). Several hours went by waiting for a semi-technical user to get the update and check the Android logs for the download location. It turns out you can get it straight from Google. With the information scattered around in different places I decided to consolidate the How-To into a single post." Note: According to attached comments, and to the TechCrunch story, it seems this is a staggered rollout, so not every Android owner may be able to try it out yet.

The JIT compiler shouldn't help at all. Given the performance needs of flash, it's almost certain that Adobe has it running natively. The only way in which the JIT will affect a native application is by clearing up resources being used by other applications.

JIT is going to more memory because you'll have both native and vm instructions in memory, whereas before you'd only have interpreted code. It's worth the tradeoff of course and will become more valuable as phone memory grows.

Dalvik's JIT compilation is going to allow future Android applications to meet and exceed the performance of applications compiled ahead of time ("native" applications). Native is really a bad term because both dynamically JIT'd code and statically compiled code is native. The main dif

GCC and Visual Studio are only used at compile time, not when deployed to end users during execution. They are limited in what they can optimize at this point in time.

Example: Java and other optimizing JITs can devirtualize methods at runtime, effectively removing lots of lookups (possibly expensive branches) thus cache misses and other hazards resulting from heavy OO/polymorphism. GCC and Visual Studio cannot do this because they have no way of knowing what type a call site may be at an arbitrary execution

Mostly theoretical optimizations. You'll be hard pressed to find many real world cases where a JIT'd Java app will run faster than a native C/C++ app for a variety of reasons. Conversely, you will not be hard pressed to find C/C++ programs which perform better than a Java JIT'd app.

Furthermore - if you care about performance (a lot of the time you frankly don't, at the level these optimizations would matter) you can just...not use a lot of virtualized methods and take other precautions to make sure you re

GCC and Visual Studio are only used at compile time, not when deployed to end users during execution.

Not exactly. Profiling [wikipedia.org] which is what I was talking about is when the program is analysed at execution time.

You compile your code, run it, profile it and then compile again with the profiler optimisations. Sure, it's not as elegant as java JIT done on the user machine however it also doesn't bog down a user's machine doing something the developer should have done on their own machines before release.

If you use a tracing JIT strategy with guards (such that you can specialize a basic block based on the type of specific arguments), you need the option to fall back to the non-JIT version if the guard checks fail.

JIT compilers do help. A good example of this is.NET, where it uses an intermediary language which is compiled/translated for the CPU it is running on, and the native binaries are cached, and complaints about performance on.NET are fairly few from what I've read.

Java has had a bad reputation in performance, but in reality, those days are in the past. There are other issues with Java, but those are not performance related unless it deals with direct hardware calls, and one can use native code for that.

I think the better test will really be for when Froyo gets ported to the G1 and seeing how Flash performs then

Have you heard definitively that Froyo will be ported to the G1? I was under the impression that Froyo and even Eclair are too big to fit on the G1. I'd love to be proven wrong -- I have two old G1s sitting in a drawer and would love to put Froyo on them. Froyo arrived on my N1 last night, and I'm very happy with it so far; there are lots of nice incremental improvements. But as far as I know, nobody is working on shrinking Froyo down enough to fit the G1.

-- Laura

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Google, but I have no inside knowledge of what the Android folks are doing. I didn't even know Froyo had been released until I saw the giant styrofoam frozen yogurt in front of building 44.

I've been tempted by this, but CM4 with compcache, swap, and the home screen locked in ram has made my phone usable. From what I understand, 2.1 is still a bit laggy on the G1....do you feel like its really faster?

You can also just go to Adobe's website and click "get flash" the link will take you to the market to download it.

One suggestion for those that install it, go into your settings and enable plugins 'on-demand' That way you will only get the Flash you want. It shows a little down arrow in place of the Flash that you click to enable. It's like a built in Flashblock/Adblock extension.

Also IMO, considering the platform, I think the Flash is working rather well. I quite enjoyed watching some Zero Punctuation videos on Escapist.com already.

One suggestion for those that install it, go into your settings and enable plugins 'on-demand' That way you will only get the Flash you want.

Thank you! (Mod parent up!)

I installed flash on my N1 and noticed a ton of flash ads, and thought maybe Jobs was right! I normally use an ad blocker when browsing (desktop) and had forgotten how bad it could be. That click to play thing will do the trick until I find a proper ad blocker.

Flash Lite 4 is in the HTC Desire already. It works perfectly fine and provides a substantial amount of what the full Flash 10.1 would supply.

Point being Flash doesn't suck and if it did, it would be beyond the realms of science to think of ways to implement it in a less CPU intensive fashion, e.g. browser doesn't launch flash apps until you click on them, or only launches same domain flash by default.

And posting over my tethered N1:)Flash has to be downloaded from the market.. and I can tell you that it is not as smooth as they make out in the youtube videos of it.It does work and it's tolerable, let's put it that way.

That being said, the whole phone is much faster... I went from stock to Cyanogen and that was a speed boost.This however, is a substantial boost.

I am looking forward to a Cyanogen release based on 2.2 - I think his roms are more polished than stock.

Is it getting hotter, do you think? I'm thinking of general browsing as well as flash viewing. And can you turn off flash in the browser? (I could have said, "how are those flash ads working for you?" !)

The Flash version on the Marketplace is still in beta and is entirely software-rendered, so expect some skippiness, heat and battery drain. The final release in June/July will do hardware acceleration, and should improve all of those things..

I gave it a try and it doesn't break anything, It just doesn't install. There are files missing in the restore that are important. Once it 'fails' you have the option of rebooting, and no harm done. There was a 3rd party one released (linked through engadget) which may work for you if you've rooted your phone previously.

Remember if your rooted and update to this, you'll probably have to re root it and install a new rom all over again to get all your rooted programs working. Unless you know how to use adb and the other utils to picjk apart features very well, You probably should just wait till your prefered flavor rom has the new features integrated. It shouldn't take long.

This is what Titanium Backup is for. Back up your apps (with the Google Market information) to your SD card, optionally back the SD card up somewhere safe, install the new ROM, re-root, and then restore your apps.

Disclaimer: I'm not related to the guys who made TB, just a happy customer.

Wow...TB carries the market information?!?! This was my biggest issue with backing up apps...they all lose the ability to update via market unless you use some third party update program that checks the market versus your installed version numbers. atrackdog is pretty good at this actually.

So I remember Steve jobs rambling about why flash was bad for phones?
- bad performance
- poor battery life
- security ?
Anybody notice poor battery performance with flash? Is it easy to kill bad flash apps or does it reboot your device like my laptop ? How good is the touch interface with flash ?

As for the battery life, Greer said it's not as horrible as Steve Jobs might have made it out to be in his open letter earlier this month. "It's not too bad," he said. "Android has a little bit of an issue with battery life anyway. I just plug it in to my laptop, so I'm not super sensitive to it. I'd definitely say it depends on the game too."

So he's saying it's "not too bad", but he keeps his phone plugged into a charger/laptop. Okay.

Well, it's proprietary on the dock end (although the connector is standard), and an Apple-branded one is $19 for a spare (http://store.apple.com/us/product/MA591G/A?fnode=MTY1NDAzOQ&mco=MTM3NTI1NDE), but you can use third party ones that are available for less.

It will charge off any USB port (active or dumb, like a power brick), or anything that will supply 5 volts.

The other posters have already slammed you on the price. But I'd add that if you Android users might feel the need for multiple cables for charging, that's a symptom of poor battery life on your chosen platform.

Dock at home, dock in the car, dock in the office. And keep an extra charger with you if you travel. These be the burden of having a smartphone with a stock battery. People ought to stop bitching and get used to it (or, carry a cellphone that's just a phone to get weeks of battery life out of them).

It's still beta, I'm able to view flash, but it doesn't seem to work quite correctly. Because it's flash I can't use my track ball to select anything in the flash and if I zoom in there's no way of moving around. On top of which I'm having some difficulty selecting small buttons. But you can turn it off and if I understand the dialog make it ask before executing. The web browser on 2.2 is significantly faster than it was under 2.1, to the point where things seem to just pop right up rather than having to wa

that Sprint will block the new HTC Evo 4G's hotspot capability, since they sell their Overdrive 3G/4G mobile hotspot (a separate box) for $99.99? Wouldn't that be dumb of them? The Evo 4G is darn tempting, but I'm waiting to see if they block the hotspot feature. If they do block it, I'll be very glad I waited and will choose another carrier who doesn't.

If its anything like Sprints HTC Hero, it will be trivially easy for you to root the phone and restore that functionality. If you can copy paste commands into a command prompt, you can root your phone.

I can appreciate your sentiment but I feel I have to pick my battles. Sprint has incredible plans and great service everywhere I go, not to mention the Evo 4G is incredible. Why toss all that away when Sprint could really care less?

that Sprint will block the new HTC Evo 4G's hotspot capability, since they sell their Overdrive 3G/4G mobile hotspot (a separate box) for $99.99? Wouldn't that be dumb of them? The Evo 4G is darn tempting, but I'm waiting to see if they block the hotspot feature. If they do block it, I'll be very glad I waited and will choose another carrier who doesn't.

So which carrier do you think is going to allow free unlimited tethering? Sprint has already announced their pricing for HTC 4G....

Yeah. I pay $95 a month on t-mobile contract with 500 minutes. Not too bad. Basically the android plan is $30 over top of whatever minute plan you choose. I was told there are no caps, but I haven't gotten anywhere near the 10 gigs the cap used to be, so I can't confirm this or not. Rooting my phone opened up wireless tethering and that's kind of awesome. Too bad 3g isn't fast enough for you tube (I get like 700-1000kbits on a good day) but it is certainly fine for some heavy web browsing.

They are advertising the hotspot feature, so unless plans change, I'm pretty certain that it will ship with tethering. I have not heard anything about bandwidth charges or caps, so it might be something worth looking at when it comes out. I do want to see the fine print of the Evo contract though.

that Sprint will block the new HTC Evo 4G's hotspot capability, since they sell their Overdrive 3G/4G mobile hotspot (a separate box) for $99.99?

Way to keep up on the official announcements. Sprint has already released their pricing for the EVO 4G hotspot - $30/mo; they're not blocking it, they're actively advertising it EVERYWHERE ON THE WEB FOR THE LAST SEVERAL WEEKS. The only unknown about it was the pricing, which they announced on the 12th. Yeesh.

The information wasn't online a couple days ago. GMAB. Do you speak to your coworkers that way?

The pricing for the hotspot was released on May 12. Sprint has been advertising that they'd have the hotspot ability with the EVO for _months_. Do you run with an adblocker or something? Sprint's been running the biggest web advertising campaign I've seen in a VERY long time for the EVO 4G.

Yeah, I do speak to my coworkers that way. Keeps them on their toes.:)

You will get it approximately whenever HTC feels like porting it to the HTC Desire AND then whenever your carrier feels like letting you have it. With a subset of the overall Android 2.2 features that they feel are appropriate for you.

No, exactly like the iPhone. For example, iPhone has supported tethering since the 3G model (version 3.0), but was disabled by AT&T. There was a short while where you could update the carrier info on the phone and it would enable tethering as a built-in function via either USB or Bluetooth.

The 3.1 update not only disabled this simple work-around, it also locked the phone so you could not downgrade to 3.0. I had an iPhone at the time, and refused to ever install the 3.1 update so I could stick with tethering. I now have a Nexus One, and have never regretted the upgrade. I also bought the N1 directly from Google, and not only did I avoid a new contract, but I'm no longer subject to having my handset intentionally crippled by my carrier.

I know you probably know this, but that is a problem only in the USA (and Canada?). AT&T really sux by all accounts, and Apple did a deal with the devil there. Again, that was because AT&T was the only nation-wide (approx) network that did things the way the rest of the world does, and Apple didn't want different models for North America only (the way every other cell phone maker does).

Otherwise the parent post is right - Apple sidestep the carrier on software features and roll-outs, more so than an

Tethering wasn't disabled only by AT&T. The situation is the same in Europe, for example both O2 and Vodafone in Ireland have setup (and locked) the iPhone so that you have to pay extra to get tethering.

Dude, it's been possible to install carrier profiles since at least 3.1. I distinctly remember downloading them from http://www.benm.at/ [www.benm.at] when I had the original iPhone (I now have a iPhone 3GS and had a 3G before then).

The iPhone is far more open and free than any Android device out there. Android devices are great, if your device maker loves it enough to update it. If not, good luck. iPhone apps work in all platforms, and make money for the app writers.

Amateurs can go to Android. If you want work done or actually use your device for something more than a toy, you buy an iPhone.

Uuh...$25 bucks to create your Android Market account and upload damn near any app you want. What is it with the iPhone? $50 and Apple has to review/approve your app?

That's completely wrong. Blackberry devices are fantastic for email, calendaring, tasks and notes, but are horrific for anything outside of that. Android seems to have potential to supplant them in productivity, especially with suites like TouchDown that bring a rather fantastic Exchange experience to any Android device. They also have great browsers, too, something that Blackberrys may never get...

Then there are RIM outages, which happened somewhat frequently when I was on T-Mobile and had a Blackberry

I've been writing some code for Blackberry over the past few months. The "developer experience" ranges from undesirable to makes me want to gouge my eyes out.

Inconsistent and poorly-documented APIs, device incompatibilities, depressingly anemic hardware, a simulator that likes to use over a gig of RAM, and a web browser that makes IE look great by comparison (and an embedded HTML widget that doesn't support the same set of features as the web browser, neither of which properly implement the DOM)

I was wrong about the source of most outages that happened to me, but the fact that I was completely dependent on a middleman server to deliver all of my data is hard to go back to after using an Android device or an iPhone for some time. The UI on the Blackberry stinks too, but that's just me. Some people could care less about that (especially for the business applications they're widely used for).

If BlackberryIM was made portable, I could see tons of people switching. That's the single most desirable f

The Over-The-Air update is a staggered rollout. But, the manual method that I wrote about here let's you avoid the wait. That said, it also seems to only be for the Nexus One now. Can't find a Droid update yet.

Replying to myself, it seems like there are different builds for different submodels of the phone. For example the AT&T compatible phone (like I have) doesn't use the same update file as the T-Mobile compatible phone. Haven't had luck finding the EPE54B download yet.

Hoops? That's just for people that aren't willing to wait for the OTA update notification. The hoops we're jumping through is so that we don't have to wait for that. Updates like this are always staggered when done OTA to avoid unnecessarily straining the network.

and if those instructions are like 'jumping through hoops' then go back to selling flowers on the street corner. My gawd, there's less than 10 steps involved and they are all simple one line explanations for each step. And if you can't follow those how do you dare go outside? And I sure hope you're not driving a car.

This 'give me one button to push so I can get what I want' mentality is getting old.

Get back on your bicycle AC and go back to chasing the ice cream truck around.

That has nothing to do with Google. That's how major updates are always rolled out. The problem is that too many users in one cell trying to update at the same time can cause network outages. So major updates like this are staggered to reduce the likelihood of network breakage. And secondly, this is hardly a simple update, it brings quite a few changes on board as well as a substantial performance improvement.. On top of that anybody who buys a phone with a custom UI, whether it be blur or sense, is going to have to wait while the patches are applied and tested before it's rolled out. That's one of the reasons why the iPhone and Nexus One are in the positions they are. Since the people writing the OS and making the changes are working directly with the engineers creating the hardware they only have to test once. Whereas people who have a custom UI on top of that have to wait several months for it to be finished and tested before getting it.

And likewise, just because a phone was released last week doesn't mean that it's been tested for the update, they used a version for development because it was the latest at that time and then they released it when it was finished. They'll now have to do testing on the new version before they release it. Doing anything else would be horribly irresponsible.

I think maybe theres a slight chance I understood what you were saying...
Was that sarcasm in the first paragraph?
"Waiting three weeks for a simple update of resorting to manual install, not even a yum. On a phone that was bought last week? Sign me up!"
Three horrible weeks OMG. I'm just glad google's around to keep the OHA from falling to the tragedy of the commons, even if it means my Droid will take a month or longer (I'm expecting 3) to get the updates announced this week.
"Just like the MS"
Ah yes,

What he said bothers you? Really? I'm not sure why. I mean, the appearance of dudes like that isn't a surprise. Think about this: Every time you make a post using the phrase 'walled-garden', a twit like him is created and sits around waiting for a story like this to say "told you so!"

Oddly enough, Cyanogenmod has had the ability to store all your apps on an SD card for quite some time and doesn't care whether the app has allowed it or not. (N1 apparently allows you to store just some of them there, though.)

Well, this is a hack. The directory is symlinked to a partition on your sd card. I believe that the apps2sd on 2.2 actually just runs from your FAT patition on your microsd, so I can understand why the application has to actually support it versus the CM hack where the internal directory is actually stored on your external microsd card in an ext2/3/4 directory. I wish I could install reiserfs....now that would be killer!

apps2sd uses unionfs (or aufs) so to the app, it doesn't matter if it is located on an ext3 partition on the SD card, or in the internal memory of the phone. This way, no symlinking is needed, and to an app's perspective, it is starting up from internal memory, regardless of where it is located in reality.

Caveat: This only works on rooted phones and requires an ext3 partition on the SD card (for permissions and such) [1].

[1]: Amon-Ra's recovery image can easily partition a SD card, but you lose all data